Frankfurter Book Fair 2012: are you going?

A general phenomenon that was to be expected seems to be that publishers don’t realize how important literary translators are for their business. Publishers depend heavily on a lively, globalized literary scene. Translators facilitate this interaction, and help make sure the global literary scene stays alive and inspiring. Literary agents (or the ones we met) seem to have a clearer awareness of this. However, agents are extremely busy and difficult to be introduced to at the Fair itself. It is better to know who’s who beforehand and make sure there are existing contacts. Publishers are interested when you ask for their rights lists, they become more eager when you tell them you are interested in their titles and want to introduce some of the best titles to foreign agents for translation. But then they pay much less attention when you offer to introduce titles from abroad for translation to be published by them. The relevant people focusing on that aspect were never there and those in rights selling positions told us they would forward anything relevant to them.
Thus, the Book Fair mostly becomes a good venue to get to know other translators, exchange ideas with them and discuss translation related matters, besides this the Book Fair is good for keeping contact with people (agents, contacts within publishing houses) that you already know, rather than establishing new contacts with people who are not translators. Then there is the huge amount of time spent walking around all the stands of publishers, gathering piles of material on interesting and uninteresting books, filtering through it and chucking part when the bag becomes too heavy, and trudging on… Much inspiration and knowledge is out there waiting, as well as a lot of less interesting material. We enjoyed our trip very much, and hope to follow up on interesting information and contacts in the coming weeks.